PowerPC LE memcmp

[Will Schmidt]

On Fri, 2013-08-09 at 14:53 +0930, Alan Modra wrote:
> This is a rather large patch due to formatting and renaming.  The
> formatting changes were to make it possible to compare power7 and
> power4 versions of memcmp.  Using different register defines came
> about while I was wrestling with the code, trying to find spare
> registers at one stage.  I found it much simpler if we refer to a reg
> by the same name throughout a function, so it's better if short-term
> multiple use regs like rTMP are referred to using their register
> number.  I made the cr field usage changes when attempting to reload
> rWORDn regs in the exit path to byte swap before comparing when
> little-endian.  That proved a bad idea due to the pipelining involved
> in the main loop;  Offsets to reload the regs were different first
> time around the loop..  Anyway, I left the cr field usage changes in
> place for consistency.
> 
> Aside from these more-or-less cosmetic changes, I fixed a number of
> places where an early exit path restores regs unnecessarily, removed
> some dead code, and optimised one or two exits.

<...>

>         .align  4
>  L(bytealigned):
>         mtctr   rN
> -       beq     cr6,L(zeroLength)
> +#if 0
> +/* Huh?  We've already branched on cr6!  */
> +       beq     cr6, L(zeroLength)
> +#endif

The "We've already branched on cr*" gives me a shiver, but I think in
those cases the earlier branch should have been on a different
conditional.  (bgtlr, ...  beq ).   If not, it's a dead path.  
As far as that goes, I think you can go ahead and chop those #if 0
blocks entirely, unless you think there is more investigation to be done
on those. 
I'm assuming that these changes have passed testing. :-)

Looks OK to me, thanks, 
-Will